The present invention concerns a method for controlling a decisional process when pursuing an aim in a specific field of application, such as economic, technical, organisational or similar and a system for implementing the method.
At the current moment, in the field of managing knowledge, the collecting of data relating to knowledge derived from internal or external sources, such as Intranet or Internet and their exchanges between various services organised to analyse them and take decisions concerning a pursued predetermined aim, systematically require the intervention of persons of users of the services in question.
The drawback of this known procedure for processing data consists of being scarcely flexible to use as it requires the presence and intervention of users to analyse and exchange knowledge data and to take decisions, and avoids systematically using all the available collective and/or personal knowledge.
The object of the present invention is to eliminate the above-mentioned drawbacks of known systems by proposing a method for controlling a decisional process when pursuing an overall aim in a specific field of application, such as economic, technical, organisational or similar, and which is charactersed in that according to rules and strategies predetermined in accordance with the overall aim, it is automated by the placing in relation of at least one knowledge object reflecting a point of view of the field of application and comprising an item of information interpreted as an alarm sign for the decisional process with other knowledge objects reflecting other points of view or other functional competencies of the same field of application or of different fields, implementing the course of the decisional process.
According to one characteristic of the invention, a network of data processing agents is created comprising agents creating knowledge objects and agents for constructing knowledge objects by adding to the created knowledge objects additional knowledge objects obtained by being placed in relation with other knowledge objects.
According to another characteristic, the network is set up in the form of a hierarchised structure dependent on said overall aim, each agent comprising a base of rules, a base of strategies and a base of individual aims, the creator agents constituting, the end nodes of the network.
Again, according to another characteristic, the agents are organised into loops, each comprising a master agent and at least one son agent, a son agent being able to be a master agent of a loop of a lower level of the network, the base of the network being formed by analysis loops of knowledge objects comprising a knowledge objects analyser master agent and knowledge objects creator agents, the knowledge objects being constructed when they move inside the structure of the network towards the top of the latter.
According to another characteristic, the structure of the network is obtained by a successive decomposition of the decision process on the basis of the overall aim into individual aims and strategies, the strategy of an agent level n becoming the aim of the agents of the lower level n-1.
According to still another characteristic, the decisional process is broken down into decisional generic steps, so-called cognitive invariants, which are propagated in the form of aims and strategies from level to level in the structure.
According to another characteristic, the network is constructed according to a fractal configuration.
According to another characteristic, for a given application, the structure of the loops of agents is determined by referring to an agent for structuring services of the loop and a knowledge structuring agent for each service created.
The system for implementing the method is characterised in that it is formed by a network of agents having the shape of a pyramid whose top constituting the level n is formed by a master agent associated with a certain number of son agents forming the level n-1, each son agent being able to be a master agent of a certain number of son agents constituting a lower level, the base of the pyramid being formed by analyser agents, each being provided with a certain number of cognitive agents creating knowledge objects.